


hallowed be the somnolence

by kamisado



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Gen, Panic Attacks, Past Drug Use, Scars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-25
Updated: 2017-04-25
Packaged: 2018-10-24 01:20:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10731210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kamisado/pseuds/kamisado
Summary: He’s no stranger to panic attacks, not anymore, and he can feel the fear pressing down on his chest. He names every sociologist he had to study in his Bachelor’s degree; he counts the Fibonacci sequence as high as he can. But the throbbing of his heartbeat in his ears is matching the pulsing ache of his migraine and all the measured counting in the world can’t bring his ragged breaths back into time.[a collection of missing scenes surrounding the events of 6x12 corazon]





	hallowed be the somnolence

**Author's Note:**

> title taken from '5 flucloxacillin' by los campesinos. 
> 
> trigger warnings for: suicidal ideation, institutionalization and frequent anxiety attacks throughout
> 
> spoilers up to and including corazon

_A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river but then he’s still left with the river._  
_A man takes his sadness and throws it away but then he’s still left with his hands._  
_– Richard Siken_

The fear creeps up on him.

In the dead of night when he's lying awake, paralyzed in the darkness, that's when the thoughts creep in. _This could have been you_.  The anxiety's always there in the day, a constant low-level presence, in the fidgeting of his fingers and tap-tap-tapping of his feet. But seven years in the BAU is a lesson in endurance and at night it tears its way out of his chest, a beast with razor claws and dripping fangs. _It still could be you._

He's seen so many awful things in his job, in the day-to-day broken bodies and broken families, but Reid’s had bad dreams for as long as he could remember. Dreams of those he couldn’t save, dreams of blood and death and screaming, the click of fired blanks aimed between his eyes and the reverb of every bullet from his own gun that punctured flesh.

But the worst dreams aren’t violent at all. He sees Morgan flanked by two doctors in white coats, he sees Hotch on the phone with hushed words and shifty eyes. Rossi and Prentiss and JJ and Penelope all stand by, a Greek chorus of ghosts, judgmental in their passive silence. He reaches out to them but they lean away, incorporeal, incapable of helping him now.

The white-hot stab of betrayal shreds him from within as he's wrenched away from half-finished cases, cases that won’t get solved now without him. He hates how this is how he made his mother feel, he hates how this was- _is_ the right thing for her and now, it seems, for him, but he feels _fine_ , there's nothing _wrong_ with him-

He wakes up thrashing, cheeks wet.

The red glow blinds him, misshapen numbers marking the time as 3.04am. His head pounds; his limbs ache. Street lamps cast ugly winding shapes across the ceiling; he traces them with his eyes and sucks in the humid evening air with gasping breaths.  A cold sweat drenches him as he drags himself upright with shaking hands.

He’s no stranger to panic attacks, not anymore, and he can feel the fear pressing down on his chest. He names every sociologist he had to study in his Bachelor’s degree; he counts the Fibonacci sequence as high as he can. But the throbbing of his heartbeat in his ears is matching the pulsing ache of his migraine and all the measured counting in the world can’t bring his ragged breaths back into time.

*

In the sickly light of dawn, he perches on the edge of his bed, head in hands. The AC in his apartment is broken again, it’s been broken for weeks, but he’s never around long enough to fix it. He strips off his soaked t-shirt, balls it as he throws it to the ground.

He feels queasy as the light catches on the scars on his arm, the winding ivory cicatrices from three puncture spots in the crook of his elbow. Time can’t heal everything. He’s seen first-hand what the human body can take, in every victim they couldn’t save, even in the deadened eyes of the ones they could. He sees bodies pushed to breaking point, minds damaged beyond repair. Not for the first time he wonders, out of all the people they save, how many of them lead happy lives now? How many of them still wake in the dead of night screaming, or flinch with every slammed door and raised voice? How many of them just couldn’t face life anymore?

 _You’re spiraling,_ he thinks, but the acknowledgement doesn’t alleviate any of the dread. He stares down at the track-marks, past the ones on his arms, to the ones that snake up his legs. The entry points he chose himself are more subtle, easier to hide, the crook of the knee, the ankle. The shame is like a dark cloud that hangs over him, a hollowness he can never shake.

He hates to see himself some days, to be reminded of his own failings laid bare like this before him. But after a night of unreality, a night so close to everything he’s ever feared, he decides to takes stock of his scars. The physical markers of a life lived. Across his body he can map nearly three decades of mistakes, big and small, a life of honorable sacrifice and abject clumsiness.

Almost without thinking he places his hand on his knee, the one crisscrossed with scalpel lines tearing through the sunburst star of a gunshot wound that nearly shattered his kneecap. On the days he can barely look in the mirror, he thinks of that scar, how hard he had to work in physiotherapy to walk again, how it still aches when the weather is bad, and how because of that, someone out there can now go home to their family.

There’s a scar stretched across the back of his left hand, a tiny nick from a rose bush two years back that turned into a lesion that nearly took his life. Maybe he nearly died, but if he hadn’t been so stupid then maybe they’d never have gotten to the cure in time. Every time he gets a cold, part of him worries he can taste the blood in his throat from two lungs filled with anthrax. But lives were saved; he knows he should feel _proud._

And there’s the little scars too, shrapnel scars that trace his ribs with the memory of exploding buildings, and roadrash in his palms from a lifetime of diving to the ground. A long thin scratch traces between his left thumb and forefinger after an accident with a new knife and a ripe tomato. His mind might fragment, but his body tells one hell of a story.

*

When he comes back into work two days later he's light-headed from the lack of sleep, blue-black bags etched heavy under his eyes. He pretends not to notice when Penelope gasps at the very sight of him, can’t even muster a smile to deter Prentiss’s suspicious gaze.

There's a tension headache nipping at him between his eyes. _Too much caffeine,_ he scolds himself as the kettle steam billows upward. He thinks of his first PhD and how he sat there staring at reams of paper until his eyes crossed, with the 2am Red Bull jitters in his fingers warping his handwriting unrecognizably.  The headaches were the same back then too. He sips on his green tea, praying silently for wakefulness.

“Kid, is everything alright?” Morgan asks as Reid throws himself into his desk chair, mumbling cusses as he sloshes tea onto the floor. He wants to tell Morgan _no_ , wants to look him dead in the eye and say _I need someone to talk to_. But when he looks up from his work, in a single split-second he can see the Morgan from his dreams, stony-faced and surrounded by medical professionals. His bones ache with the uncommitted betrayal. He blinks the image away furiously; it’s just Morgan alone, straddling his seat with a single eyebrow raised.

“I’m fine.” The words are bitter on his tongue. He's fine, of course he’s fine. He's always just _fine._

*

Miami comes and goes. When Ruiz hands Reid the bracelet, he keeps it, twists it round and round his wrist, combs his fingers over the yellow plastic beads like a rosary. He knows in his heart that he should seek medical help for these headaches, the migraines that now stretch for days on end instead of hours, the ones that now pulse with haze, instead of relying on the spiritual healing of someone he’s just met. But the motion of twisting the bracelet is a comfort, the only comfort he can find thirty thousand feet up in the air when Hotch is tearing him apart for wandering into a suspicious building without a vest on.

Reid apologizes, of course, but he knows there’s no way of explaining why he just _couldn’t_ wear that vest any longer, how it weighed him down like a drowning man’s pockets filled with pebbles, like a chest cavity filled with water.

Reid knows that not much fazes him. With every new case there’s another awful thing for him to look at with clinical detachment bordering on the concerning. But after Miami, he’s frightened. Frightened how Ruiz could see through him, frightened at how the team can tell something’s wrong. But most of all he’s frightened by the blinding intensity of his headache in the showdown with Professor Walker. How it reminds him of Randall Garner and Tobias Hankel and Gary Brendan Michaels all those years ago, every mistake he made and every memory twisted out of shape.

He should have known that there are no secrets on a team like this.

The fistfuls of Xanax he forces down make him hazy like the narcotics he still craves in the fallout of their worst days and he hates it, he hates the way that he can’t sleep anymore because the headaches keep him up at night, how the never-ending waves of pain force his stomach to lurch. The plane soars north into the day’s fading light; the team settles down for every minute of sleep they can eke out of the journey.

He hates how exposed he feels, how it’s blinding bright even in the dark.

*

Reid never liked hospitals. Long hours spent on warped plastic chairs, waiting for news of his colleagues, powerless to act as they bled out on cold metal tables. The sunglasses do nothing to block out the garish strip lights overhead as he wanders down winding corridors. His skin looks alien in the fluorescent light, translucent, stretched thin over the pock-marks of abused veins. The scattered signs across the walls are filled with opaque acronyms that he can’t summon the energy to puzzle out. But he knows where he’s going; he’s been here before.

_Magnetic resonance imaging._

There’s something about MRI scans which fill him with a sickening ill-ease. The perfect storm of claustrophobia and anxiety about his health. Every concussion that crossed his eyes, every bout of unconsciousness caused by knock-out blows, and he’d wind up here. But this time isn’t quite the same. The nurse who signs off his paperwork barely hides her concern as he squints up at her in the brightness. In his work as a profiler, they talk in the abstract sense, all possible eventualities and probable outcomes until they find the one made flesh, the Unknown Subject a person once more.

Not for the first time, he thinks that having an eidetic memory is more curse than blessing.

As he ties the hospital gown behind his neck, Reid thinks of all the physical manifestations this headache could be taking, tumors and swelling and internal bleeds, Latin names branded behind his eyelids, all problems he can’t just puzzle away. The abstract, the inexpressibility of pain made very real indeed. His right hand tightens in the papery gown as the quiet hum of machine envelops him, a fistful of fabric an anchoring point for a mind adrift at sea; the all-too familiar weight on his chest crushing down again. He tries not to think about the things the scan will never show, the slow decline, the days of forgetting to eat, of worrying too much to sleep.

He’s a behavioral analyst, that’s his fucking job title, but he knows nothing good will come of scrutinizing himself that closely. He can't let them know how afraid he is.

*

At the mention of the word _psychosomatic_ his mind goes blank. He’d turned every eventuality over in his mind, the physical manifestations of every end-of-days scenario his mind could muster. But psychosomatic means _there’s no physical cause;_ it means _it’s all in your head;_ it means _it’s not real._

He knows that he’s wrong, deep in the back of his mind he knows that psychosomatic means that even if the cause is mental, the physical symptoms are very real. Complex scientific theories and names of relevant articles are pulled from the depths of his memory subconsciously but it’s all meaningless if they won’t tell him the _truth._

The fear bleeds into fury.

“I’m not crazy.” He hates using that word, he knows it’s a slur and he doesn’t mean to but it spills out anyway.

Just uttering it aloud makes him feel like a fraud. Something’s making him wince under the lights and throw up on the jet and cast auras around his teammates when he’s forced to squint to focus. He can’t doubt that. The nurse had asked if he’d hallucinated, and sure he’s been seeing decapitated doves every time he’s closed his eyes because that Miami case was really something else, but that’s not hallucinations, right?

“I have headaches. I have intense insensitivity to light because there's something wrong with me physically, not mentally.”

He’s used to his traitorous body failing him, the opiates and the anthrax, the sickening withdrawal and the speech aphasia. But this is his mind making him ill, the one thing he could always rely on, turning on him. The doctor’s face is kind, concerned, but Reid knows he needs to get out of this room now before the next migraine, the next panic attack, this symbiotic relationship of suffering that’s become his life.

“Listen, Doctor, my mother's a paranoid schizophrenic who's been institutionalized, so I know I know very well what mental illness looks like, maybe even better than you, and it's not that.” Surely, the doctor has his medical records in front of him, the liner notes to his life. Even though he’s trying to talk around it, he must have figured some kind of link between the onset of headaches with the slow decline of schizophrenia.

As profilers, they work in the abstract, running scenarios and analyzing probabilities. Half the time their work feels like one long numbers game, waiting to find the one that matches. Correlation might not imply causation but it’s hard to remember that when what you do for a living is inference. He knows that if he can’t trust known statistics and likely outcomes then there’s nothing left.

“It's not.” He mumbles, half to himself on the way out. It feels like a lie.

*

Three days later, he collapses.

Thankfully, he’s not out in the field when it happens, but somehow that makes it all the more embarrassing. The briefing is short, the murders are shocking as ever, but he feels desensitized, distant from the pictures right in front of him. There was a time when the sight of victims made him want to run and hide, made him shiver with the memory of digging his own grave in a Georgia cemetery.  The room is spinning even as he sits. He’s not a medical doctor, oh how people love to remind him that, but even he knows the physical devastation sleep deprivation can wreak on the human body. As he tries to leave, a mumbled excuse about a glass of water on his lips, his knees buckle entirely; he hits the floor hard.

In retrospect, he knows he really ought to have seen it coming.

He comes round in a hospital, the last place he ever wanted to see again. Through the mist of semi-consciousness, he expects to see the team bearing down on him, fussing over him. At the very least, Penelope, ready to bombard him with all the information he’d missed, or Hotch there to tear him a new one about over-working and responsibility.

But instead he just sees Morgan slouched in the chair next to him, half-heartedly reading a newspaper. Reid toys with the idea of pretending to be still unconscious; the thought of an interrogation makes him want to sleep for a decade. The moment passes.

“Hey, kid,” Morgan says gently, as if they’re on the plane touching down in Virginia and Reid’s slept through the landing once again.

“Hey.” Reid looks anywhere other than at Morgan. His head is fuzzy from the painkillers, god he hopes someone told them not to use opiates, but maybe it’s just the remnants of when his head met the ground fast. _I’ve had enough of feeling sorry for myself_ , Reid thinks bitterly, his mood firmly intransigent.

“Do you wanna tell me what’s going on?” Morgan’s using the same voice he uses on kids, the ones they save, with hollow eyes and hands that tremble. Reid tries to turn away, but the IV line in his forearm snags with a sharp pain. He feels himself blanch with just the thought of the needle. “The doctor said you collapsed from exhaustion.”

“It’s just headaches, that’s all.” He feels petty, childish. This is not doing anything to help stop the team treating him like a kid, but with everything that happened in Miami he just wants something to keep to himself. He knows he should have learnt that he’s lousy at keeping those kinds of secrets.

“Reid.” Morgan sounds like Hotch and Gideon and his father and every other father figure who could see right through him.

“Right, fine. If this is the way it’s going to be.” The words come spilling out before he can stop them. “They’re not just headaches, okay. I don’t even know what they are, and I’ve had MRI scans and tests and all they’ve given me is painkillers to try and take the edge off. They go on for _days_ Morgan, sometimes almost a week goes by before I can remember what having no pain feels like.” The beeps of the heart-rate monitor to his left are beginning to speed up. A harangued nurse looks up briefly from her station. Morgan just stares, fitting the pieces of the puzzle together in his mind. But Reid knows this is only half an explanation.

“And _that’s_ why I haven’t slept a full night in weeks, and _that’s_ why I hated Miami so much, because I spent half the time worrying if I had a brain tumor. And the tests told me that this is psychosomatic! They can’t tell me what’s causing this, because apparently it’s all my own fault!” He can feel himself spiraling out of control; the heart rate monitor is beeping out a shrill tattoo and the nurse is beginning to stomp over, shaking her head.

Morgan takes his hand, squeezing it tightly. Reid closes his eyes, forces himself to focus on his breathing, counting it in, counting it out, grounding himself with Morgan’s hand. By the time the nurse has reached them, the beeping has almost returned to normal and she leaves again with a short nod. He’s no stranger to panic attacks, but by now he thought he’d gotten better at keeping them confined to the four walls of his apartment or the flimsy structure of a toilet cubicle. He feels hollow, vulnerable. But when Morgan squeezes his hand, Reid has to meet his eyes. He doesn’t look terrified or patronizing or angry, all the reactions that Reid had feared. He’s calm, still, a flicker of concern in his furrowed brow.

“Look, Reid,” he says, after the heart-beat monitor has returned back to a calm pulse. “I’m not gonna tell you it’s gonna be okay. Cus, for one thing, I don’t know enough about medicine to tell you that it is.” Reid notices that Morgan is still holding his hand; he thinks if Morgan lets go now he’ll disappear, never to be seen again. “But you’re not alone.” _There it is._ The patronizing sentiment makes Reid snatch his hand away instantly. Morgan snatches his hands to his sides like he’s been burnt.

“But some things we all have to face alone, Morgan.” He thinks of every time he’s been alone with an UnSub, every time he’s had to talk someone down with a gun pointed at his head. “It’s not _your_ mind that’s going to decay; it’s not _you_ that’s going to end up in a sanitarium for the rest of his life because he’s too deluded to look after himself-.” His voice cracks on the last word; he can’t even look at Morgan.

“Is that what this is all about?” Morgan asks, cutting Reid off at the pass as the nurse squints at them sternly. “Your mom?” Now more than ever, Reid wants to rip out his IVs and never have this conversation. He holds Morgan’s gaze, hoping he’s projecting petulance rather than the abject terror about speaking his deepest fear aloud.

“We both know the genetic risks,” is all Reid can manage, his voice a choked whisper. Morgan places his hand on the sheet next to Reid, so close their fingers almost touch.

“Yeah.” Morgan’s voice is barely audible. Reid wonders who will be the first to move. The silence stretches out between them. “But, when it happens- _if_ it happens, we’re not gonna leave your side right? You can’t get rid of us that easily.” He’s trying to exude nonchalance, lighthearted and affable, but Reid’s never seen him so sincere.

In that steady gaze, Reid realizes what he’s missed, that final puzzle piece that makes the picture whole. He’s not just afraid of the illness, of fragmenting every piece of carefully curated knowledge he’s amassed over nearly twenty-nine years of life. He’s not just afraid of institutions, hospitals and sanitariums alike, of their stifling walls and stolen agency. It’s the fear of facing it alone.

Behind the forced calmness, Morgan looks beyond cut up at all these revelations. Reid suddenly feels beyond nauseous at the thought of Morgan committing him; _how could I have ever thought that?_  And if it ever does come to that, he knows that Morgan will have made the right call, just like Reid himself did all those years ago. He just didn’t want them to treat him like a victim, or to scrutinize his demons like every Unsub they’ve ever hunted. But deep down, he realizes that he’s been too focused on the thought of betrayal to realize trust, too blinded by the fear of standing out to know when to ask for help.

 _It’s not okay. It might never be okay._ But he’s not alone.

He takes Morgan’s hand.

 

**Author's Note:**

> find me on tumblr [here](http://indigoecho.tumblr.com/)!


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